Donald Trump, the current Republican presidential pacesetter, hailed by supporters for “telling it like it is,” in fact has made a fortune by telling it like it isn’t. It goes back to Cincinnati where he got his start in real estate.

That was “my first big deal,” he wrote, portraying it as a star-is-born moment. In the 1960s, he and his father bought in the city’s Bond Hill neighborhood a 1,200-unit apartment complex called Swifton Village, fixed it up, filled it up and eventually sold it for a profit of approximately $6 million, according to Trump’s retelling in his book, The Art of the Deal.

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“My timing was really good,” he told POLITICO in a recent interview.

In truth, the deal was far less lucrative. And the project earned a bit of notoriety for the Trumps when a prospective renter filed a lawsuit against their company with charges of racial discrimination, the first of a number of similar cases filed against the Trump real estate empire.

Trump’s father, not Trump, purchased the property in January 1964 — the middle of Trump’s senior year in high school at the upstate New York Military Academy. During Trump’s time in college and after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s undergraduate business school in 1968, he intermittently helped his father at the apartments doing mostly menial tasks like yardwork, Swifton workers told local reporters.

“He did not run this place. His father did,” secretary Eileen Schumaker told Cincinnati magazine in 1987, after Trump’s book came out. “He was straight out of school, and had absolutely no say in nothing,” longtime maintenance worker Roy Knight added, later telling the Cincinnati Enquirer that Trump “wasn’t skilled.”

And the sale? In December 1972, the Trumps sold Swifton, a process in which the 26-year-old son did have a role, but the sale price was $6.75 million, versus the $5.6 million purchase price plus about $500,000 in repairsand maintenance — a nice return, but nowhere near a $6 million profit.

But the legend of the “Cincinnati Kid,” as Trump dubbed himself in Deal, has always relied on a certain flexibility with numbers, especially when it comes to his personal fortune. It’s a flexibility he extends to politics, where his say-anything style has been read by many voters as an expression of confidence and independence, an unwillingness to be fettered by the rules of the game.

“So,” Trump said in June, during the speech at Trump Tower in which he announced his candidacy, “the total is $8,737,540,000.” He waved in his right hand what he said was a one-page statement from his “highly respected” accountants. He assured everybody he wasn’t bragging. “I don’t have to. Believe it or not.”

In July, in the run-up to the release of Trump’s presidential personal financial disclosure to the Federal Election Commission, his campaign promised in a news release that his net worth was “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.”

The disclosure document itself, 92 pages, said Trump is worth somewhere between $1.4 billion and infinity, confirming that he has had success selling real estate, golf courses and related paraphernalia, as well as himself and his name.

If Trump is a genius at anything, and it’s a word he has used, it’s this: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.”

Trump had been on the Forbes 400 list since it debuted in 1982, when Forbes estimated his net worth at $100 million and quoted him as saying, “Man is the most vicious of animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” By 1987, Forbes estimated his net worth at $700 million. The next year, the magazine bumped him up for the first time to an even $1 billion, while the New York Times estimated his worth at $3 billion.

What was the real number?

“Who can say?” Trump said to Newsweek in 1990. “It’s like a painting.”

That year, though, his estranged first wife, Ivana Trump, told the Philadelphia Inquirer he was worth between $400 million and $600 million. But it was dwindling. New Jersey casino auditors that September estimated he was worth a little more than $200 million — casinos, hotels, his airline, a lot of which he was about to lose.

Following his well-documented half-decade financial nadir — he was not on the Forbes list from 1990 to 1995 and has said that he was at one point worth negative $900 million — Trump was back on the list in 1996 at $450 million, even though he told the magazine the number was “probably over $2 billion.”

In 2005, as Deutsche Bank pegged Trump’s net worth at $788 million, journalist Timothy O’Brien published his book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, in which he cited three sources saying Trump really had a net worth of $150 million to $250 million.

Trump told O’Brien, “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.” Then he sued him.

O’Brien’s attorney talked to Trump in a deposition in December of 2007. It was revealing.

“Mr. Trump,” the attorney said, “have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?”

“My net worth fluctuates,” Trump said, “and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings — but I try.”

In 2009, when a judge in New Jersey finally tossed out Trump’s suit against O’Brien, Trump told the New York Post that he was worth “over $5 billion or $6 billion.”

Clockwise: Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate Donald Trump bought in 1985 and turned into a resort; Trump, campaigning in Iowa in August; and Trump’s iconic New York City building, which opened in 1983 with 58 stories of apartments, offices and retail. | Getty

It’s more than 40 years after the Swifton sale. It’s more than a quarter-century since Deal.

Omitted from Trump’s version in the book is the lawsuit filed in November 1969 in which a couple named Cash alleged that Swifton, identified in court records reviewed by POLITICO as “Fred C. Trump’s New Swifton Village Apartments,” wouldn’t rent to them because they were black. They said the manager called the white woman who was helping them a “nigger lover.” The case ultimately was dismissed after the Cashes were allowed to rent an apartment — but it would not be the only time Trump faced accusations of racial discrimination at the family’s rental properties.

In 1973, in New York, the Department of Justice sued Trump Management Corporation — with 39 buildings and 15,000 apartments mostly in Brooklyn and Queens — alleging that Trump and the company were refusing rentals “because of race and color.” Trump — by then, he, not his father, was the president of the company — called the charges “ridiculous” and filed a countersuit, which a federal judge threw out, deeming it a waste of paper and time. Almost two years later, Trump reached an agreement with the government in which he admitted no guilt but said he wouldn’t discriminate against minorities.

With Swifton, “the buy and the sell turned out to be really good timing,” Trump told POLITICO. “No matter how good you are, timing is so important — and some people have timing and some people don’t, and I have it.”

The financial disclosure , his campaign crowed, is not meant for a man of Trump’s “massive” wealth. Maybe. But it’s also well-suited for a man of his brand of ego and bombast — it relies on self-assessments and asks for only so many specifics.

The document shows Trump is involved with 515 corporate entities, almost always as director, chairman, president or all of the above.

It shows people pay Trump to talk. His per-appearance speaking fees range from $50,000 to $450,000.

It shows the books he’s written evidently serve a purpose beyond dollars and cents. In the past 18 months, Time to Get Tough brought in $50,001 to $100,000 in royalties, Deal brought in between $15,0001 and $50,000, and Think Like a Champion brought in $5,001 to $15,000. All his other books have brought in less than $201. The Way to the Top. How to Get Rich. Think Like a Billionaire. Think Big and Kick Ass. The America We Deserve.

Trump signed the document, as is his way, with a marker-type pen, with dark ink and a thick tip, making his signature difficult to decipher but undeniably bold.